South-East Asia Command

South-East Asia Command (SEAC), established in October 1943 after Anglo-American agreement at the first Quebec conference in August 1943 (see QUADRANT). Its operational area contained Burma, Malaya, Sumatra, and, for clandestine missions only, Thailand and French Indo-China. Its supreme commander, Admiral Mountbatten, a compromise choice, had his HQ at New Delhi, India, which he moved in June 1944 to Kandy, Ceylon. His deputy was an American, first Stilwell and then Wedemeyer (see Chart for command structure ). His instructions, issued by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, were to increase pressure on the Japanese in the Burma campaign and elsewhere, in the hope of drawing off their strength from the Pacific war; to maintain the Hump air supply route to China; and to open a land route for supplies through northern Burma as quickly as possible (see Ledo Road).

From the first, SEAC was bedevilled by staff problems (see Axiom Mission, for example); by Mountbatten's conception of his role which clashed with that of his Cs-in-C; by differences between British and US strategy (an American wit said that SEAC's initials stood for ‘Save England's Asiatic Colonies’); by shortages of matériel; and by the intransigence of Chiang Kai-shek. As a result, operations to invade Sumatra, to land on the Andaman Islands, and to take the offensive in the Burma campaign, were all frustrated. An operation (PIGSTICK) to land on Burma's Arakan coast met the same fate. ‘PIGSTICK,’ Churchill informed Roosevelt, ‘has become PIGSTUCK.’ Eventually, it was the Japanese who rescued SEAC from its inactivity by launching the Imphal offensive in March 1944 which ended in their defeat by Slim's Fourteenth Army the following year.

In November 1944 General George Gifford, C-in-C of Eleventh Army Group which administered all British land forces in SEAC, was replaced by General Leese who headed a new land forces organization, Allied Land Forces South-East Asia (ALFSEA). This incorporated US troops who had formerly come under Stilwell's Northern Combat Area Command (see China–Burma–India theatre). In May 1945 Leese was replaced by Slim, whose Fourteenth Army HQ moved to India to plan the invasion of Malaya (ZIPPER), and a new Twelfth Army was formed under Lt-General Stopford to control British and Indian formations in Burma. On 15 August 1945 SEAC's boundaries were altered to include the Netherlands East Indies and French Indo-China. ZIPPER went ahead on 9 September 1945, after the formal Japanese surrender, but there was no fighting and Mountbatten held a surrender ceremony in Singapore on 12 September. In June 1946 he handed over to Stopford, and on 30 November 1946 SEAC became defunct.